CHAPTER 1: THE BEGINNING

Sanji's POV

I woke up to Zoro shaking me vigorously, a worried look on his face. I sat up on my hands, limbs shaking with trying to hold me up; the jolt must have knocked me out. I scanned the barren landscape around me, getting paranoid when I saw nothing but smoke. I had no earthly clue where we were, or where the rest of the crew was. There was a large train behind me, spewing smoke at regular intervals and making the breathing hard. So that's where the smoke was coming from! Zoro helped me to my feet and I brushed the dust and gravel from my jacket. Checking my pocket, I cursed. I had no more cigarettes.

I noted several men in uniforms were gathering near the box cars, profanity flowing freely between them. One of them turned and approached us. His face was contorted in a scowl, yet I had given him no reason to be angry. Then I noticed it: his small brown glass like eyes were not focused on us - which is when I noticed we seemed really out of place dressed like we were - but on a clipboard with just one slip of paper on it. The medals on his shirt made me think he was some kind of higher up, and that just made me wonder more.

Where in the world had we ended up, and how did we get here?

He looked at me and gave me an odd look, like he had never noticed I had arrived, and checked the clipboard again. He then glanced at Zoro with the same look, checked his clipboard, and waved some other man over. The men exchanged foreign words and puzzled looks before they threw us each a bundle of brown clothing, a hat positioned daintily on top.

"You're with us now, son." The scarred man told us, before walking off to the front of the train, profanity once again flowing from his mouth at the other man.

"Hurry up! The train is leaving!" the shout sounded almost garbled, not like proper English, and it came from beside us, probably from the younger man checking the wooden box-cars behind the engine. Still confused as hell, we followed him, taking our bundles with us. He led us to an empty box-car and yelled at us in the foreign tongue, gesturing to our cloths and then to the bundles.

"I think he wants us to change cloths." I said, after he had shut the door mostly. We started changing into our brownish colored garb, the pants being too long or too large and the shirts being practically skin tight. The fabric itself was cheep to the touch, rough and scratchy, like it was made to be mass produced quickly with no care to whom was wearing it, yet it had an inner softness to it once it settled into place on my skin. The hats were odd and small, the same dirt brown color as all the other cloths, and Zoro just discarded his out the door like it was nothing. We hid our old cloths behind some barrels for when we went home.

If we ever got home, anyway.

Just as I got my hat to stay in place and not slide off my head, the door flung open, blinding light spilling into the dark car. I saw four figures enter the boxcar, but they were just silhouettes against the white light behind them. The door slammed closed, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light. But in that light, the four others stood out.

The first man, closest to me, had a lit cigarette in his mouth, the glow from the end making me want one for myself even more. The uniform he wore was a muddy gray-blue, with dulled silver lining and thick black boots. His hair was a dirty blonde color, cropped short and gelled forward in the front, and tapered to the nape of his neck. His eyes caught mine for only a moment, his brown flecked with blue almost smiling at me, and he flicked his cigarette up once toward the odd-colored orbs, like a sign of approval. Approval for what, I still don't know.

The man next to him was lying on his back, legs crossed and hands behind his head. He was in the same dirt colored uniform we wore, black belt, black boots and all, and he was looking at the ceiling with a small smile on his face. He reminded me of Luffy, almost, but his expression was not of being overjoyed at the prospect of adventure but a resigned content with his lot in this place.

The man next to the content one was sitting with his back spooned against a barrel, knees to his chest and his eyes flickering back and forth at all of us. He seemed incredibly paranoid about being here. He wore an apron over the standard dirt-fit, as I came to call it, and it almost made me paranoid when I saw something red all over it. I felt better thinking that it was only tomato sauce - that it was not blood - even though the sheen in the dim light made me want to think otherwise.

Then, I saw the forth. She was shorter than the rest, and her dirt-fit was better fitting and tied around the waist with a tight, buckle less black belt. She had dirty looking brown hair that barely reached the nape of her neck, parted in the middle and tucked behind her ears, one small strand falling across her forehead. She had pretty emerald eyes and the small smile on her face made her almost as pretty as Nami. She was dusting off a gun of some sort, longer and thinner than I had ever seen, with an odd tubular thing attached to the top. Her eyes caught mine and her smile faded quickly, the frown replacing it making me tense involuntarily.

"What are you looking at?" She growled softly, baring her teeth in an animalistic fashion. I just blinked once, too scare to speak.

"Don't make me shoot you." She didn't growl this time, but her words were laced with some kind of hatred, and she was holding the gun up, the odd tube to her eye. She was going to kill me! I was going to die! Oh, I do wish I had—

The man with the cigarette started chuckling, interrupting my hailstorm of last wishes and painful regrets. I stared at him and his laughing, appalled.

"Why in the world are you laughing?!" I asked rather loudly. Here I was about to die and he was laughing. The girl let out an exasperated sigh and hung her head.

"Sorry, your face just looked so funny I had to laugh! Though I doubt you didn't know this already, but she'll shoot anything that annoys her, be it tanks or officers. She shot me once, right in the Schenkel. I had to learn never to make her cross the hard way more than once." He said, the smile gracing his features barely noticeable in the dim light.

"Now, Alina, don't go shooting fresh blood." said the one who reminded me of Luffy. The pretty girl, I presume called Alina, put her gun down and scowled at him.

"I know, I know. I'm not idiotic like two people in this room." Alina shot a half scowl, half smirk at the cigarette man and the one that remind me of Luffy. A look of realization struck the content one's face like a ton of bricks.

"Hey! They don't know our names yet!" Aleksandr chirped gleefully, scrambling up and stretching. Yea, definitely like Luffy. He squatted down back to my level – I had sat down on a barrel during the whole exchange of scowls - and stuck out a hand for a handshake, almost hitting my chest in doing so.

"I am Aleksandr Sokolov. Good with high rate of fire weapons." I took his hand and shook it firmly. These people were getting to be so strange they were scary. High rate of fire weapons? What in the world?

"This is Alina Valentina. Expert sniper." He gestured to Alina, and in the closed space, it almost touched her nose. She had commenced to dust off her gun once more, a scowl set in her features. She glanced up at the offending limb, looking ready to bite it off if it got any closer.

"She loves the Scoped Mosin-Nagant. She could fill you full of holes within a minute." At this comment Alina gave a curt nod and snapped her teeth once, making Aleksandr tuck the offending limb behind his back.

"And that is Borislav Mendeleev. He's a Tank commander." Aleksandr gestured with the other hand to the cigarette guy, who was tapping the ashes of his 'stick onto the crazy guy's shoe.

"Call me Borya." He said lightly, smiling.

"Alright then, Borya…" I said, trying out his name, "Do you think I could have one of those sticks? I lost all of mine." Borya fished the dented pack from his pocket and tossed one of the long, white sticks into my hands, along with a box of matches.

"Make it last kid, I don't have many of these and when I get low I won't share." He was grinning, but the threat was obvious in his voice. I lit up quickly, tossing back the matches and letting out a contented sigh. Zoro sighed as well. He was being rather quiet; maybe the jolt of the Merry-Go has upset his stomach or something. I looked back at Borya, who was poking his twitchy comrade in the arm.

"Hey, Vladimir, we have company. Tell them your name." The crazy looking man, Vladimir, twitched once and started muttering off words in the foreign language the four of them used, which seemed slightly different than the other language the scarred man had used. Vladimir glanced at Zoro, hate in his eyes, and then glanced at me. He gasped, his eyes wide with fear, and pointed at me with one shaking finger.

"German spy!! H-he's a German spy!! Nazi! Nazi devil! Get away from me, you German Nazi spy!!!" He was shrieking, and Zoro and I had to cover our ears. We exchanged confused looks. German? What was that? And what was a Nazi? And a spy? For who? What was going on here?

The four all gathered around the shrieking comrade, trying to calm him down. "Whoa!" I could hear Aleksandr's voice over Vladimir's fearful screaming,

"Calm down Vladimir! He's not a Nazi spy!" It was a good minute before the shrieking stopped, and it took two men, a strong pretty woman, and a lot of threatening with a gun to calm the poor thing down. I was starting to pity this man. Then Aleksandr turned to us.

"I'm really sorry. Vladimir had a… bad experience with a Nazi spy, and he is kind of paranoid now." Aleksandr explained, with an over use of hand gestures and a shrug. Alina sighed, running a hand through her hair, tousling it slightly, before turning to us. She scoured me with her emerald orbs, scrutinizing Vladimir's claim.

"You sure Vlad's being paranoid again?" She asked, giving me one more once-over. All eyes turned to stare at me, even Zoro's. "You have to turn your head to the side and squint a little bit, but he almost resembled one of Leyna's cousin's or something. Maybe it's just the blonde-haired, blue-eyed thing." Alina said with a half hearted shrug.

"You think all of those gray-clad devils look like her cousin's or something. Are you sure it's not just the fact you hang around her too much?" Borya's question fell on deaf ears, and that made him pout. Alina was staring at me again, and it was making me nervous.

"What's your name anyway?"

"I'm Sanji, and this is Zoro." I spoke slowly, gesturing to myself and then Zoro. Our names sounded funny to me for some odd reason. "And we aren't from around here. Can you maybe explain what's going on?" I asked. Borya choked on what was left of his cigarette, Aleksandr just gaped at us, and Alina gave us a look that said 'Where have you been?'

"I take that back. He's too out of it to be a Nazi." Alina said, going back to her Scoped Mosin-Nagant (SMN).The train lurched once, tipping me off my barrel, but not affecting anyone else in the car. I sat back next to Zoro, waiting. The door slammed completely closed, and we were in utter darkness.

We were on our way, but I didn't know where.